Unless you go to Quebec that's not really the case. Most of Canada is English, you'd have a hard time using french outside of Quebec (or maybe Ottawa). There's plenty of schools around to learn French though.
Agreed. I have a friend studying at the UofW, and he knows not a single word of French. Everything is in English. Same on the west coast, too (I live in British Columbia). The only French we see is on legal documents and govt websites (they are required by law to be available in both English and French).

As for Australian accent, I just got an Australian physics prof (has a Wikipedia page, too! Rodney Jory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), and it was my first exposure to Australian accent (I've lived in Canada for about 7 years now), and for the first 2 weeks, I understood just about nothing... After a few weeks (3 hrs/week of him constantly talking) I could understand ~70% of what he says, though.